Is it working?

Happy Blog Action Day, folks. If you haven't already joined in, you've still got some time.

In this month's Wired magazine, I came across an interview with the authors of a new book, Break Through. The book came out earlier this month, and it looks to be nothing short of an absolute refuting of the steps being taken by the current environmental movement.

(Disclaimer: In the spirit of honesty, I should probably point out that I haven't gotten a chance to read the book just yet, so everything that I know about it comes from the Wired article and the book's official site.)

The article's skimming of the book's ideas absolutely thrills and excites me. My understanding of the basic premise is that the small steps being currently taken by the various parts of the environmental movement - pushing bike riding over car driving, suggesting that we turn our lights off, reminding folks to carpool whenever they can - are failing. They're just examples of folks spitting into the wind because no matter how many small steps in the right direction we take, other folks - developing nations, primarily - are taking gigantic strides in the opposite direction by opening up more coal-fueled power plants, chopping down the rainforest, and dumping mercury into the water supply.

What we need, says the book, is a massive, coordinated investment from our government:

What if the economic solution to global warming weren't a matter of putting on the brakes but of stepping on the gas? What if environmentalism's emphasis on limits and "not in my backyard" restrictions was hopelessly at odds with the average American's belief in a limitless future? With a handful of like-minded partners, they drafted the New Apollo project, the first version of their plan for a federally subsidized greening of the economy. They hired an economist to run the numbers and determined that a $300 billion government investment could call forth another $200 billion in private capital. (To prove their independence from traditional environmental politics, they picked someone who had worked for the Bush administration.)

The public loved the idea. In polls the two conducted, a New Apollo scale investment plan got a thumbs-up from practically every group, including, most surprisingly, non-college-educated males — classic Reagan Democrats — the very voters who are generally antitax, anti-government spending, and anti-environmentalist. In fact, instead of being a drawback, the scope of the project was a selling point.

Instead of taking small, uncoordinated steps and hoping that the green revolution will take place slowly, coming together from these slight movements, the authors want to throw huge amounts of money at the problem, knowing the public money in this large a project drags in private money along the way. With such a sizable investment, we'll be able to come up with the revolutionary technologies that we need to even consider solving the global warming problem. Everybody loved the idea, and I do, too. But there was a hitch:

It soon became clear that the project conflicted with the shorter-term goals of those same interest groups, and ultimately the duo was asked by other environmental lobbyists to stop pushing the legislation in Congress. "Labor groups were interested in protecting existing jobs in the US rather than creating jobs in the new-energy economy," Shellenberger says. "Environmental groups were more concerned with regulatory limits on greenhouse gases and raising fuel-economy standards." They had tried to be strategic by forming a coalition of interest groups, but interest groups were, in fact, the problem.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus became convinced that as long as policy was shaped by special interests — including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club — there would be no policy other than short-term, narrowly focused fixes.

The stupid environmental groups were getting in the way. Special interest groups were getting in the way. Instead of letting the revolution get funded, they wanted to fight for their little steps. Instead of pouring gasoline onto the fire of the global economy by investing in a revolution in greentech, they want to reign back production because currently we can only produce if we're polluting.

It's an interesting proposal, and lord knows that we have to do something to pull back our carbon emissions, but I want to read a little more before I throw more money than God after the problem.

In the meantime, I'm certainly going to be swapping out my incandescents for fluorescents, buying low emission paints, composting, combining trips, and doing all the good stuff that we've been asked to do for years.

Whadda ya have to say about that, folks?